Where the Line Breaks Page 3

  ‘I’m to be an officer. Thanks to the university.’

  His father took another long sip. ‘Lots of sleep tonight.’

  As he walked to bed, his father called to him across the room. ‘Alan?’

  ‘Yeah, Dad?’

  But somewhere between him turning around and the next sip of beer, the moment passed.

  ‘G’night.’

  They strode into the fields at sunrise, the father and his sons, and not one of them said a word. The sun baked the soil clay-hard, and the sweat dropped down the end of his nose, and looking up at the old man bent over the scythe, he thought he understood: there is a strength in silence. A safety there. He thought, the old man couldn’t do it, but there’s nothing stopping me. He thought, I am not my father.

  The next day he returned to Perth for the last of his training.

  Months later, with summer in full swing, the train pulled into town. He stopped at Rose’s first, her sisters, the Princesses, crowing over him, tears in her mother’s eyes. Then Red’s house – the two boys standing side by side in their uniforms, competing, even now, with Red’s mother and Laurie fussing around them – and then he walked the long dirt track out to the farm that didn’t feel like home anymore. Ma cried. Dad went to the pub for a drink, and didn’t come home until much later.

  When he told them the next week that he’d be shipping out, off to Egypt for further training, and then on to an unknown battlefield, the silences became more pronounced; he felt he could curl up in them, great voids of the left-unsaid.

  He should have sat down with Dad and said his piece, but he didn’t. He chose silence. Safer that way.

  Dad had never called him ‘my boy’.

  They sit and talk until the mosquitoes find them, and the spell is broken. The sun has plunged into the sea. Time to head back.

  He rises, and runs a hand down the creases in his shirt. Rose swings her feet back and forth under the bench and reaches for his hand.

  His voice, when he speaks, is a whisper, and he directs his words to the oval, rather than the woman at his side.

  ‘I’m going to marry you, Rose.’

  ‘Oh yes? And don’t I get a say in that?’

  He swings his head to look down at her. She always knows how to make him smile. He drops to one knee, throws his right hand behind him in a dramatic gesture and takes a deep breath.

  ‘Yes. I will.’

  Before he can utter a word, she’s answered for him. She pulls him to his feet, and then on tiptoe reaches up to kiss the tip of his sunburnt nose.

  The crickets chatter in the gloom. Across the oval, a kookaburra starts up his raucous laughter, watching their display.

  ‘I’m just saying,’ the large man in the blue suit is just saying, ‘with you gone, who’s gonna take all our wickets next season?’

  Alan finds Red deep in conversation at the bar, cupping his chin in his hand, trying to listen. His hand doesn’t look like it will support the weight of his head. There’s drool on his wrist. Australia’s finest.

  ‘Know what I mean?’

  Red knows what he means.

  Alan clamps his hand on Red’s shoulder and dodges the wild punch Red swings at him, pulling him up before he falls off the chair.

  ‘How many have you had? You’re a mess, mate.’

  Red draws close and buries his head in Alan’s shoulder and blows a blubbery nose into the clean linen. His eyes are hot and wet as he pulls away. He turns back to the large man.

  ‘This is Alan. Al. Alan.’ Red swats a hand in the direction of Alan’s chest. ‘Al, this is some bloke.’

  He reaches out and shakes the man’s hand, mouthing ‘sorry’ over Red’s downturned head. ‘Pleased to meet you. This is my fiancée, Rose.’

  Red lifts his head. Fat tears roll down his cheeks, but there’s a dumb smile on his mug.

  ‘She ain’t your fiancée, she’s mine. Ain’t that right, Rose?’ Red glances between the two of them, looks down to take a sip from his long empty glass, and then back up. They’re looking at him, waiting for the hammer to drop. ‘Fuck off, really?’

  Alan glances over to the love of his life, and then down at his best friend.

  ‘Why do you always copy what I do?’ The tears are streaming down Red’s face.

  Rose laughs.

  Alan grins, ‘You’ll have to be best man. Ok?’

  Red is sniffing and laughing and ordering a bottle of their most expensive whatever-you’ve-got from the bar. Alan pulls Rose to him, closes her hand in his and gives it a quick squeeze. This. The beginning.

  The town has one tiny station, and it’s chockers, families from every part of the surrounding district crowded in to say goodbye to their boys. Alan has that rumbling in his stomach. Too many beers the night before. Too many thoughts to contain in his head, so they bubble in his gut. On the next seat Red groans, his slouch hat pulled low over his eyes.

  ‘You want to say goodbye?’ Alan says, but Red just grunts. ‘Aren’t you worried you might not make it back?’

  Red lifts up his hat and looks up at him. ‘We’re both coming back.’

  On the platform outside his window, Rose waits, radiant in white against the red bricks. He didn’t think it possible for one body to hold this many tears, but there are wet lines down her face. He pushes his face up against the window, squashing his nose flat on the smudged glass.

  She laughs, a quick burst that fades among the general chatter. He reaches an arm out the thin window above his head. She moves closer to him, and takes his hand as it hovers above her. It’s an awkward position, the metal frame of the window cutting into his armpit, Rose clutching the solitary limb. His mother moves forward from the crowd behind Rose, and wraps an arm around her shoulder.

  ‘She’ll be right, Al. We’ll look after her.’

  He grins against the pain shooting through his arm, the blood cut off by the frame, his hand turning red.

  ‘Thanks Ma.’

  Rose kisses his hand.

  ‘Plan on giving that back anytime soon?’ he says.

  She sniffs, a wet snivel that turns into a chuckle as she notices the colour of his fingers. She lets go, and he glides over her fingertips as he pulls his arm back in.

  Behind Rose and Ma, a tall figure steps into view, and for a brief moment he thinks it might be Dad, until the tiny shape of his niece steps out of the shadow, and he can make out his brother Tom beneath the wide brim of the akubra. Tom lifts his daughter up by the underarms, and raises her up to the window. Her nose is freckled by the sun, her fingers brown with dirt.

  ‘Bye, Uncle Al. Don’t die.’

  He laughs, and bops one finger on her spotted nose. ‘You know if you keep growing at this rate, by the time I get back you’ll be taller than me? Then you’ll be my uncle.’ Her tiny face crinkles in confusion, and turns to her father for confirmation. Tom smiles, then catches Alan’s eye through the glass and nods his head. Like they’re kids, playing cricket out back.

  Ma has one arm around Rose, and puts the other around Tom.

  ‘Robbie said he’d write you. He reckons they’ll ship out within the month so he might catch you in Egypt.’

  ‘I know, Ma.’

  ‘And he said he’s already beaten your record for the quarter-mile.’

  ‘I know, Ma.’

  Her voice is getting shakier with each word.

  ‘And your Dad. He said to stay safe.’ Sure he did. ‘Said, he loves you.’

  He nods. Better for them all to pretend.

  A whistle blows, and the crowd on the platform surges forward with final goodbyes. Uniformed men clamber aboard and fill the corridors. Alan reaches up and out the window, taking Rose’s hand as she sobs.

  ‘You’ll write?’

  ‘Every day.’

  In the vest pocket of his tunic, tucked away in the back of his notebook, he carries a photo of her, her raucous laugh threatening at the edges of her smile.

  ‘Promise you’ll come home to me, Alan Lewis.’

>   He considers her eyes through the smudged glass, the vivid green of an algal bloom, the eyelids red and swollen. Her white dress brushes against the side of the carriage.

  ‘You’ll ruin your dress.’

  ‘Promise.’

  ‘I promise.’

  He mouths three words as a second whistle blows, white smoke drifting down the platform, the train lurching forward. At some point, Red has stood up by his side, slouch hat in hand, looking out at the families. He puts a warm arm round Alan’s shoulder, and steadies him as the train sways.

  Rose holds Alan’s hand through the window, and as the train picks up speed, she walks alongside the carriage, watching her feet among the feet of the other young women trying to delay the moment of departure for as long as possible. The noise is getting louder, soot and dust and smoke blowing onto her dress.

  They’re running out of platform. Rose jogs beside the train, and he worries she won’t let go, will keep running beside them, and trip, and fall beneath the heavy churning wheels and be crushed, that he’ll lose her forever. She braces herself with her free hand on the window. Now it’s him not wanting to let go. The train horn blows three times, loud and clear. He’s not sure he can do this without her.

  She lets go.

  In the grime of the window, a perfect outline of her delicate fingers, a ghost wave.

  1 Chronicled extensively in three successive bestsellers by Jennifer Hayden, quickly establishing her as the leading academic in the field and making her a household name: Poems of the Unknown Digger, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1995; Unearthing the Unknown Digger, Bloomsbury Publishing, London, 1996; and One in a Million: Recognising Genius in the Poems of the Unknown Digger, Bloomsbury Publishing, London, 2000. I am proud to call Jennifer Hayden my mentor and inspiration. Em calls her the other woman in our relationship.

  2 Such is their popularity that they have even been nominated as an alternative to the Australian national anthem. See ‘Aussie Public Votes for War Poetry over “Advance Australia Fair” and “Waltzing Matilda”, The Sydney Morning Herald, 16th March 2008, p. A6. Em says surely anything would be better than ‘girt by sea’.

  3 Gary Johanissen, ‘On the Spirit of the West’, in Australia: Finding Meaning in the Outback, E.L. Smith & T. Morrison, eds, UWA Publishing, Perth, 2010, p. 110.

  4 Johanissen, ‘On the Spirit of the West’, p. 111. I read ‘Illawarra Flame Tree’ in bed to Em one night and she got all teary, and when I asked her what was wrong she said, Nothing, it’s just when you read them they make sense to me. I love your accent.

  Too fuckin’ right, ay? I said.

  5 Brian Bishop, The Anzac Legend. Fisher & Fisher, Sydney, 1991, p. xxi. In year three I dressed up as Alan Lewis for Book Week, arguing that there were enough books about him in the library to justify my choice. I wore my grandad’s medals, and spent the day picking up litter on the playground and telling kids off for not wearing their hats, because ‘it was the right thing to do’.

  6 Note the poll conducted by The Sydney Morning Herald in March 2002 (12th March 2002, ‘Words & Pictures’, p. 3) asking for public votes for the Greatest Australian Heroes. In first position: Sir Donald Bradman. In second position: the Unknown Digger. While not definitive, it proves my point (third place was Mad Max). I, too, am guilty of holding up the men of the Australian fighting forces as paradigms of decency, chivalry and heroism. Both my grandfathers fought in the Second World War, and I grew up with an unhealthy predilection for the bellicose. As a child, I collected model airplanes, in particular, Second World War–era fighter planes. Perfect scale replicas of Spitfires hung above my bed, a Messerschmitt Bf 109 sat on the landing strip that ran across the top of my wardrobe.

  7 Em was in the middle of writing her own thesis, before she got headhunted by the Prof and had to put it on the backburner – Vestigial Paraforms in the Early Prodigean Eco-Languages – so she knows her stuff. I asked her if she knew any war poets, and she rattled off the big names, but no Australians.

  Notice anyone missing from that list? I said, nuzzling into the warm space between her legs. This would have been in the first few weeks we got together. Post-coital small talk about all the big things.

  Women?

  I smiled up at her. Zero Australians. How can that be?

  Any South Africans?

  The Unknown Digger is the most important poet of the twentieth century – I nibbled the inside of her thigh and smiled as she wriggled away from me – and I want to be the person to unmask him.

  8 The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, George Walter, ed., Penguin Classics, Sydney, 2007, comprehensively catalogues the finest examples of the genre. All the major names are represented, sometimes multiple times, alongside lyrics to various soldier songs written by anonymous larrikins, ready to inspire the next generation of war-obsessed young children. I remember how exciting it was, in those first years after Jennifer Hayden’s discovery, to read Australian poems in front of the class – war poems that sounded like we sounded – and not just ‘Clancy of the Overflow’ for the umpteenth time. I imagined an author that looked like the soldiers I knew, like the photo that hangs in the drawing room at my grandparents’ house: slouch hat, slight smile, the grainy blur of time. Grandad looks like me in that photo.

  9 I heartily recommend finding a copy of The Moods of Ginger Mick (Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1916) – and no Australian library worth its salt is complete without a copy of Leon Gellert’s Songs of a Campaign.

  10 Hayden, Poems of the Unknown Digger, p. ix.

  11 Sometimes things become so obvious, all at once, like puzzle pieces when you finally make out the budgerigar or the steamboat or whatever it is you’re making. You think your life is all set out, that you can see straight down the path laid out before you and all you need to do is take one step after another, hunker down at the library and chip away at your thesis and come home each night and microwave pasta and sleep and wake and repeat. That easy. Then you start to notice the way the South African girl putting books away in the aisle next to you keeps glancing sideways, so you make a stupid joke and she laughs, then you eat lunch together, and she tells you about the thesis she’s writing, about her home in Cape Town, the beach and her dogs, about London and the university.

  You ask yourself, what would Alan do? And you pluck up your courage and ask her out for a drink. Then you spend six hours downing margaritas at that little tequila place you know in Soho, until it’s three in the morning and they close at four. Your foot is resting on the bar of her stool, and her leg is rubbing against yours, little black ankle boots turning slow circles. You lean in so you can hear her over the sound of the band in the corner, the twang of the guitar and the low throbbing of the double bass, and the way your head is turned to hear her you’re staring at the soft skin of her neck, the vein pulsing. She tells you about her boyfriend of five years, how they’ve been having troubles recently, how he’s ready to start a family but she’s not. And she isn’t ready, the way she looks into your eyes while she’s saying it, saying she wants something more than that, someone more. She says something you don’t catch, so you lean in closer, until you can feel her breath on your ear, and you’re painfully aware of where your bodies touch, your arm on the back of her stool, and her hand, slowly, like snow falling, resting on your leg. Turning your head a quarter inch will be the greatest thing you ever do. And then it’s late-late, or way too early, and you’re stumbling the dark streets towards the night bus that will take her home, and she’s kissing you outside a strip club, the bouncers laughing at the way she fumbles with your belt, and down a moonlit alley you slip your hand down the front of her jeans, feel her knickers lacy wet under your clumsy fingers, and the warmth between her legs, and you pull your fingers from inside and taste, lick your fingers and smile at her, at the green dye in her hair, at the self-conscious tilt of her head, and you raise her chin and kiss her beside the bins.

  What would Alan do? Retreat back down the line, or charge in and damn the consequ
ences? A night later you are lying in her bed, with his winter coat hung up behind the door, and every crunch of leaf and twig beneath the feet of the people walking by her front window sends your heart racing because she jumps at every little judder the house makes – every neighbour turning keys in their front door might be the jangle of keys in her front door that would spell the end of this world. But that makes you both bolder, makes it all more concrete, maybe, and you couldn’t leave anyway, not when she’s holding your wrists down beside your head, not when she’s planting kisses down your stomach and the streetlights on her face are like tiger stripes when she closes her eyes, and you put your hand on her back, on the curve of her spine as she pulls closer to you, and the tattoo of the rose on her hip, in its simple black lines, rises and falls in time, and the sheets that smell like him will smell like you tonight, when he is lying here instead, and her fingers and toes curl into fists, like she is trying to hate you and herself for what you’re doing. Her nails sink into your back like she wants to rip you apart.

  You kiss her by the front door when she gets the message saying he’s on his way home, and you say your goodnight, and let that be the end of it, and you walk down the street in the dark and you catch the night bus home halfway across London to sleep in your single bed alone while she curls up with him and tries to convince herself it’s just a fling.

  Like nothing is growing, deep within the ground, that will redefine the boundaries of the world you both knew, that will send the tube lines scattering in all directions as it bursts forth through the sewers and pipes and rat-strewn dark beginnings, and bloom forth into glorious, artistic, blue-skied perfect London.

  CHAPTER 1: An examination of the circumstantial evidence for the authorship of the poems by Lieutenant Alan Lewis: Primary sources from Lewis’s movements through 1915–18 and the Unknown Digger poems.

  With the unearthing of the verses, the Unknown Digger surpassed Banjo Paterson, Henry Lawson, Sydney Steele and Leon Gellert to become ‘the pre-eminent exemplar of Australian poetry’.12 His poems were devoured by a public waiting for a champion to believe in, and in his poetry they discovered an idealised image of Australia they could proudly endorse. It has been argued that the poetry of the Unknown Digger is ‘as important to the idea of Australia as kangaroos, swearing and ice-cold beer’.13 His poems have been put to music, fronted media campaigns, inspired Australian academics to move across the world, and have been published and reprinted more times in the last two decades than any other work authored by an Australian.14 His most famous works have become culturally ingrained into the Australian psyche. ‘Red Earth’ is Australia. ‘Anzac Bay at Midnight’ is Australia. ‘Ken Oath’ is ‘more Australian than a barbie on the beach on Christmas Day’.15